Funders and other institutions are increasingly adopting policies that require research articles funded by them to be deposited and made freely available in institutional or other repositories. We have Green OA policies to allow authors, librarians and others to comply with their obligations to their institutions and funders (see below for more information about this).

Our Green OA policy also specifies what content can be shared in social sharing sites. See our social sharing page for more background information about social sharing).

Policy (Version 1.0)

Green OA applies to all our journal articles, but it is primarily designed to support OA for articles that are otherwise only available by subscription or other payment. For that reason, we are more restrictive in what we allow under Green OA in comparison with Gold OA:

The final, published version of the article cannot be made Green OA (see below).

The Green OA version of the article is made available to readers for private research and study only (see also Information for repositories, below). We do not allow Green OA articles to be made available under Creative Commons licences.

SMUR (Submitted Manuscript Under Review): Any version of the article that is under formal review for inclusion in the journal.

AM(Accepted Manuscript): The version of the article that has been accepted for publication. This version may include revisions resulting from peer review but may be subject to further editorial input by Cambridge University Press.

VoR(Version of Record): The version that is formally published. This includes any FirstView article that is formally identified as being published before the compilation of a volume issue as long as it is citable via a permanent identifying Digital Object Identifier (DOI). This does not include any ‘early release’ article that has not yet been fixed by processes that are still to be applied, such as copy-editing, proof corrections, layout, and typesetting. The VoR includes any corrected or enhanced VoR.

Our Green OA policies are compliant with the article deposition requirements of many funders worldwide including the US National Institutes of Health, the US National Science Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the UK’s Hefce.

Repositories hosting Green OA articles are able to make the articles freely available to their end-users after any applicable embargo (shown in the table above). Articles may be deposited before the embargo ends, and metadata about the article may be publicly shared immediately.

End-users may not themselves redistribute or create derivate versions of the deposited work.

We require repositories to include:

If an article has not yet been published, a clear statement that the material has been accepted for publication in a revised form, with a link to the journal’s site on cambridge.org.

For all published articles, a link to the article’s Version of Record in cambridge.org – for example, via a DOI-based link.

A clear statement that end-users may view and download the material for private research and study only.